Sry, meant the european ones. I’ll fix it.

I’m sure our european, government-funded and therfore independend public broadcasting services will be outraged after they hear that our cute little Greta was tortured in a prison that looks Guantanamo-like, with blood and bullet holes in the cells!

The most just army of the world torturing a young, peaceful lady. An army we support!

This will result in weeks of coverage: Politicians being interviewed, human rights experts, Greta herself, debates on what sanctions should be put on Israel…

Just kidding. They’ll hide it between news about a massacre in Africa and the weather report. And in two days, it will all be forgotten.

I’d rather have a new Witcher game in the quality of Witcher 3 ($80m) than 3 episodes of a series.

But then, what do i know?

1. True.
2. Does not make it painless.
3. Would not help those with those diseases that are (for now) incurable.
4. If you put a pig in a small pen, prevent it from moving, and slaughter it in the ‘ideal’ moment, the meat will be cheap. If you allow it to walk on grass, it will burn loads of calories and therefore be much more expensive. If you wait until it dies of old age rather than killing it before it becomes a teenager, the meat will be unaffordable in a society where everyone is equal (for not 3 billion live from a few dollars per day). Lab meat is Sci-fi. If we allow Sci-Fi, we can also allow uploaded conciousness, eliminating all biological suffering, but that’s a ideal Sci-fi scenario that no one living today will see.
5. If nobody cleans the toilets and the sewers, it will become nasty rather quickly. If you pay those that do the dirty work more, you create inequality and envy. Robots are Sci-fi.
6. The human brain has a agenda of it’s own.
7. There would still be an insane level of suffering required until someone abandons all hope and chooses voluntary euthanasia.

Life is not subjective because suffering is not subjective. If you really believe that life is what you perceive it to be, prove it to yourself by sleeping on a nail-bed starting tomorrow.

Let’s say we lived in an ideal global society. No inequality, no hatred, no pedo-governments, no war.

• We would still be immersed 24/7 in a corrosive gas that slowly kills us with each breath we take.
• Our bodies would still require constant maintenance trough regular and painful excercise.
• Our bodies would still be ravaged by disease: The cold. The flu. Tooth decay. Anxiety/Depression. Corona. Aging. Cancer. Death.
• Billions of Pigs would still be tortured every day so this ideal society does not have to waiver anything.
• We would still work 9-5 doing necessary but boring stuff like cleaning toilets, assembling devices, maintaining machines, disposing of waste, spraying the fields. Because all those modern ameneties require much more work to produce than happiness they generate.
• We would stilk fear the day when this ideal society collapses, even when this society was actually eternal. Because brains are designed to worry.
• There would still be plenty of disabled people. Physical and mental. They would not be equal, even in an ideal society. Millions of those would be in constant pain, with no cure in sight.

Life is only beautiful to masochists and or sadists.

There is no truth in flesh, only betrayal.
There is no strength in flesh, only weakness.
There is no constancy in flesh, only decay.
There is no certainty in flesh but death.
--Credo Omnissiah

The Automaticus

Creating 1500B € out of thin air to build killing machines: Whatever it takes to protect the country!

Spending 50B € to actually protect the people from poverty/malnutrition/starvation: Nooooo we can’t afford that.

Humanity at it’s best: Limitless effort to create suffering, 0 effort to reduce suffering.

In political science, the term polyarchy (poly “many”, arkhe “rule”) was used by Robert A. Dahl to describe a form of government in which power is invested in multiple people. It takes the form of neither a dictatorship nor a democracy. This form of government was first implemented in the United States and France and gradually adopted by other countries. Polyarchy is different from democracy, according to Dahl, because the fundamental democratic principle is “the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals” with unimpaired opportunities. A polyarchy is a form of government that has certain procedures that are necessary conditions for following the democratic principle.

So yeah, you are right. A representative “democracy” is not a democracy. It’s a monarchy with more than one ruler.
A gummy bear is as much a bear as representative democracy is a democracy.

I didn’t know that, because i was taught in school that a representative “democracy” is a form of democracy. And the name makes it sound like one. But it isn’t. It’s not even supposed to be in theory. I am sure 99% of people living in a representative “democracy” don’t know this.

I hereby encourage everyone to abandon the word representative “democracy” in favor of polyarchy or maybe oligarchy. This makes it much clearer what we are talking about.

Also i doubt the authors of this article know this, because they imply that representative “democracy” is desirable, but it is obviously undesirable.

Here in Germany there are constantly scandals where politicians sign off illegal deals with the industry, and when the word get’s out, the contract is kept secret to minimize the damage to reputation. Whistleblowers are hunted and politicians that did blatantly illegal things are protected under “immunity”.

In that case i’ll give the Netherlands the title of actual democracy. Let’s hope it lasts for a long time.

I was thinking about the time before the internet, like 1980s, not like the more distant past

For me democracy means rule of the people.
Of course you can define words as you want, and say that only direct democracy is rule of the people, while representative democracy can be oligarchy dressed as democracy, but for me using such a definition makes the word democracy meaningless and undesirable.

Let’s say i put myself out there and say people should vote for me if they want world peace.
Let’s assume the people vote for me, because they want world peace.
Now that i am elected, a lobbyist from a arms company visits me and asks me to grant them an export license to sell weapons to an agressor (let’s assume i have the right to sign such deals).

Are there laws in place that allow me to prevent my voters from finding out that i granted that export license, like a law that says i don’t need to report publicly that i signed this? Or maybe even a law that prevents journalists from reporting on this even if they find out, because the contract (or it’s contents) are considered secret and publishing it would be illegal?

Is it a representative democracy with secrecy laws? Then no.

There is no democracy on this planet because all democracies are representative democracies. In representative democracies the politicians are not representative of the people, but they promise to do things a certain way, and if people elect them for it, that’s like indirect representation. However this breaks down as soon as secrecy laws are put in place, because if the government or private companies can decide which knowledge will reach the people, and which will not, they will simply declare information that will upset their voters to be secret. This breaks all representative democracies.

Personally i think we would live in a utopia if people consumed cave-art and stories by storytellers rather than this book-slop which is easy to mass produce and distribute.

That’s sarcasm. Don’t worry.

Democracy

There is no democracy on this planet because all democracies are representative democracies. In representative democracies the politicians are not representative of the people, but they promise to do things a certain way, and if people elect them for it, that’s like indirect representation.
However this breaks down as soon as secrecy laws are put in place, because if the government or private companies can decide which knowledge will reach the people, and which will not, they will simply declare information that will upset their voters to be secret. This breaks all representative democracies.

Then there is the issue of corruption, which is generally legal under the guise of lobbying.

And because all democracies that i know of have secrecy laws, they can’t be considered democratic.

Liberty

With the liberal part: A person can only be free if they feel safe. But in all countries (that i know) there is a large part of the population that works most/all of their day because they are (rigtfully) afraid they can’t pay for their daily needs if they don’t. And they don’t like their job.
So how can any society claim to be free, if a (large) part of their population is not controlled by their ambitions, but by their fears? If you dislike your job, but do it anyways because if you don’t you die, that’s not freedom. That’s the definition of slavery.

Am i OK?

Absolutely not. Here a list of problems that could (all) be solved by diverting some funds from the world’s militaries:

1. Startvation
2. Malnutrition
3. Homelessness
4. Climate Change
5. Wage Slavery fixed by UBI/Scary Communism

And here a list of things that can be fixed literally for a negative cost. People would be richer while fixing the following problems:

1. Mass animal torture fixed by Veganism.
2. War
3. Any disease, physiological or mental including aging fixed by Antinatalism

And these are just a few of the worst problems. All of them fixable. Many for free.

Knowing that all of the problems are easily fixable, and the people around me are not only not working on them, but actually making things worse by dedicating their live to emitting CO2 (SUVs, Meat-Eating), supporting (Wage-)Slavery (Being against UBI), and making more babies so they may suffer under these manufactured conditions makes me sad (and angry).

I would say the first step in fixing these problems is realizing that things are absolutely not OK. That earth is closer to hell than to paradise. The next step is realizing that no sane person can (or should be) OK under these conditions. And the final step is implementing a solution, ideally with the help of others.

I agree on all of this, but were books different (except for surveillance)?

• Back then those authors that wrote books with messaging supporting the owner class received loads of coverage from their media andtherefore spread their propaganda far and wide. While the average Joe could write whatever they want, nobody was able to see it (until now with social media), because printing is timeconsuming and expensive, and marketing even more so.
• Back then fascists spread their ideas in books, today they do on social media. In both cases supported by the money of the 1%.
• Back then only politically active people were surveilled, now it is everyone. This is a big change.
• Back then entertainment was inexpensive, now it is basically free.

Also that’s not really the point the article is making. They say that simply reading books makes you smarter. As if people read physics books in their freetime back then. No, they just read entertaining stories, and now they stream entertaining stories. Nothing has fundamentally changed. Back then Oil made you part of the owner class, now it’s IT and the owning of marketplaces.

Tldr: New tech (audiovisual media) bad, old tech (reading) good.

They even say that good reading skills lead to liberal democracy. Which is ironic because there is no government on this planet (that i know of) that is democratic (or liberal).

Personally i think we would live in a utopia if people consumed cave-art and stories by storytellers rather than this book-slop which is easy to mass produce and distribute.

But that would infringe on my God-given right to own a car, eat meat, fly once a year and replace my 50" TV with a 20% larger one every 4 years!

How dare you?!?

I would rather have black people far away starving than living like THAT!

Makes sense. What ideals are more german than racism and ehnic clensing which logically follows? They were willing to give their lives to enforce those ideals all over the world.

And if you reject those fundamental ideals, can you ever really be a german?

I agree that the Gentoo wiki is almost always better than the Arch wiki (and would recommend it to any user), but i really doubt installing complicated packages is remotely as hard as on Gentoo.

While i have never used Arch before, i did use Manjaro, and there stuff was always just install the package and be done. I never had to alter the Kernel config, and all program features were just there. I also had VMs on Manjaro, and i do not remember any manual configuration (though that was many years ago, so maybe i misremember).

Recently i wanted to encode a video in ffmpeg, but it didn’t work. After a bit of searching i found that the codec requires a use-flag to be set. Classic Gentoo moment.

It’s not that i dislike Gentoo. In fact i do not consider returning to Arch (but i might switch to NixOS if my Gentoo install breaks). But i wouldn’t switch to any other distro.
It’s just that Gentoo is configured in a way that is so minimal by default that even basic use-cases require changes in the Kernel config: systemd? Kernel config. Bluetooth? Kernel config. LUKS? Kernel config. Amdgpu? Yes, exactly. BTRFS? Yes. Blender? Yeah OK, that goes without kernel config.
And the worst about the Kernel config: You don’t know which values are set by default. You might just end up in nconfig realizing that the values were already set.

Then there is the instability in the distKernel (which i use). I think i started with Kernel 5.10LTS ish. Every upgrade went well until like 6.1 LTS, when Emerge complained about i think module ordering or something. It would not emerge a newer Kernel any more, which made me reset my Kernel config and redo it entirely because i thought Kernel 5 and 6 configs might be incompatible. That worked (somehow) until 6.6 LTS, which i wanted to install at version 6.6.6 LTS. But emerge complained it could not install it. I waited and ignored the update, and eventually got trough at version 6.6.20 or so. After that it refused to update again, which made me blacklist all non LTS kernels. I am now on 6.12 LTS, even though i am not a LTS guy, simply because i don’t want the hassle.

And still, after all of this effort for being minimal, it boots in like 20s, while Arch does it in like 3 or so. Gentoo hates me.